All harm, no benefit: the only result of school closures is 750,000 dropouts

Three quarters of a million children have dropped out of school in SA since the pandemic began in March last year.

Those who haven’t dropped out have lost a year of learning due to lost school days since then.

Yet schools being open, shut or on rotational timetables has made no impact on general Covid-19 infection rates and teacher deaths.

In other words, it’s been a fruitless and tragic exercise, with researchers stating unequivocally: “We believe there is a strong case for proceeding with full-time, daily and traditional timetable attendance of primary school learners, as gazetted by basic education minister Angie Motshekga on 28 May 2021.”

These shocking findings were released on Thursday in the latest NIDS-CRAM report (National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey) which is nationally representative and surveys the same 7,000 South Africans every few months during the pandemic.

The figure of 750,000 dropouts is half a million up from pre-pandemic rates over the same amount of time.

“This is the highest rate in 20 years,” said Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, a researcher for the department of basic education, who presented the findings.

Based on an analysis of their data, the researchers also estimate that “as much as a full year of learning has been potentially lost by the majority of learners since March 2020”.

A huge driver of this was the adoption of rotational learning, where different cohorts would attend schools on different days.

What this essentially means, explained Mohohlwane, is that “a grade 3 learner in June this year is educated to the same level as a grade 2 in June this year”.

These findings are particularly tragic in the context of emerging data that suggest disruption to the school system did not affect the shape of the pandemic.

As Mohohlwane pointed out: “The level of teacher deaths followed the overall population trend” through the waves of the pandemic and had no correlation with the opening and closing of schools.

“It remains clear that the vast majority of teacher deaths occurred during the first and second waves of the pandemic in July 2020 and January 2021, and there is no apparent association between the timing of schools being open and increased spread of the virus,” they said.

Another report, released by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), said the same thing earlier this week — that opening and closing schools had no impact on how the waves of the pandemic rose and fell.

SA is not alone in these tragic outcomes.

According to a paper published in the journal Nature this week, developed countries have not been too hard hit by school dropouts resulting from the pandemic, but “across the world, 770 million children still weren’t going to school full time by the end of June 2021 and more than 150 million kids in 19 countries had no access to in-person schooling”.

They were either learning virtually or had no schooling at all, and in SA virtual learning is rendered highly uneven due to the huge wealth gap.

UN cultural organisation Unesco estimated last year that about 24 million schoolchildren would drop out as a result of the pandemic. 

Countries that had far more resources before the pandemic are the same ones that are not seeing their children losing out on education. According to the Nature article: “In the United Kingdom, children returned to school in March and April. In France, a third Covid-19 wave shuttered schools briefly around that time, but pupils were back in class by May.” 

In the US, more than half of all school districts had resumed full-time instruction by early June and nearly all offered at least some in-person learning.

In SA, this loss in education is coupled with highly inflated levels of food insecurity.

Though child hunger has improved since April 2020, it stabilised at a rate far higher than before Covid-19 struck.

It is now “nearly twice at pre-pandemic levels”, said the researchers, and doesn’t seem to be budging.